Those were the days, my friends, we'd thought they'd never end...

Friday 24 June 2011 04.02 EDT
First published on Friday 24 June 2011 04.02 EDT

As we look forward to a digital world, we journalists can never stop looking back... back to the days of printed copies selling in their millions on a daily basis... back to an era of seemingly unlimited advertising.

(In truth, it was never like that: ads didn't flow in by themselves. But the situation was certainly much better than it is today).

Anyway, Ben Fenton, in today's Financial Times, has written about those days in a sidebar to the interview with Guardian Media Group chief executive Andrew Miller (see separate posting).

So prepare - if you're of a certain age - for a warm nostalgic bath. In 1950, with TV sets in only 9% of homes, a British street of 100 houses could be relied on to buy 140 newspapers a day and 220 on Sunday.

In 2010, with each of those houses containing an average of 2.6 TVs, the same street bought just 40 papers a day, Monday to Sunday.

Some advertising revenues fled to TV as it developed in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, but not in such great numbers as to ruin newspapers, which could still rely on huge circulation sales income.

In 1966, the Daily Mirror sold 5.1m copies a day, the Daily Express 4m and the Daily Telegraph 1.4m. Last month, those titles had circulations of 1.2m, 631,000 and 635,000 respectively.

This trailer, for a film called Tabloid, gives a flavour of the madness that was Fleet Street in the 1970s. It's impossible to describe the plot quickly, but I have written about it previously (here) and see also Derek Jameson's review in today's gentlemenranters.com.

Anyway, the madness - the big editorial staffs (alongside a huge printing and production work force) living high on the hog with generous expenses - was possible because of those ad revenues.

In recent years, as we all know, those revenues have started to disappear from print, migrating largely to the internet.

According to the AA/Warc expenditure report, in 1998, the first year it recorded online advertising spend, advertisers spent £2.4bn buying space in newspapers, at today's prices, and £19.4m online. It projects that by 2012, they will spend £4.7bn online and £1.7bn in newspapers.

But the amount of money generated by online advertising is far from compensating for falls in print ad sales. Of UK national titles, only the Daily Mail's publisher releases its digital advertising revenues, which were £12m in the last financial year.

Last week, the Guardian Media Group said total digital revenues for 2011/2012 are projected to be £47m.

So, in sum, we know where we are going. We know where we have been. What we don't know, at least, don't know for sure, is whether we will secure enough revenue to ensure a long and healthy future.